Finnish professor has lifelong fascination with Mississippi

GREENWOOD, Miss. (AP) — When he was in high school, Mikko Saikku read a lot of William Faulkner's work and many of the plays of Tennessee Williams. It kindled his interest in Mississippi and the ways of the Deep South.

Then, in college, he heard Mississippi bluesmen Buddy Guy and Junior Wells play in a small night club, cementing his fascination with Mississippi.

Saikku lived and grew up in Finland, where he is now a professor at the University of Helsinki and an internationally known environmental historian.

As an academic, he focused on the YazooMississippi Delta as the subject of his doctoral dissertation in the 1990s. The 2005 book that grew out of that dissertation, "This Delta, This Land," is considered the seminal environmental history of the Yazoo-Mississippi flood plain.

Saikku took time out from a fishing trip to the Delta to visit Greenwood on Friday evening and to talk with locals about his work.

Saikku grew up hunting, fishing and bird watching, cultivating an interest in the natural environment. Literature and music, especially American and distinctly Southern varieties, sparked his curiosity about the South's culture.

As a student in college and after, he pulled these interests together with the tools of the historian after hearing American environmental history pioneer, Alfred Crosby, talk about what in the 1980s was a relatively new interdisciplinary field of study.

Saikku wrote his first academic paper on the extinction of the Carolina parakeet, asking what environmental changes resulted in the extinction of that bird species native to the American south.

Finally, as a graduate student, he settled on a topic that seemed worthy of a dissertation.

"I read a lot of Mississippi history," he said, "but none of it dealt with the human-induced changes in the environment that happened so fast in the Mississippi Delta."

He observed that what might have taken 500 or more years to evolve on the European continent took barely 100 years here — the nearly complete deforestation of millions of acres of old-growth, bottomland hardwood forest for economic and agricultural purposes.

Some of the key questions he addresses in "This Delta, This Land" include: How was this former wilderness transformed from forest to farmland? What happened to human and nonhuman creatures as a result of that change? How did this change in the physical environment reflect and form societal change?

These far-ranging inquiries capture both the complexity and uniqueness of the region and its people, and the integral mind-set of Saikku.

When he was at Tulane University, studying the human engineering of the Mississippi River over a century, he traveled to Oxford for a Faulkner conference and met Wiley Prewitt, author of "Faulkner and the Natural World." Prewitt, who became a close friend and has guided Saikku's continued exploration of the Delta, attended Friday's talk at Turnrow Book Co.

"To get your boots muddy, you must know natives," Saikku said.

On this trip, one of many that Saikku has made annually to the Delta since the early 1990s, he and his teenage son have been staying on Montgomery Island on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi, just across from Rosedale, at the hunting club of Morgan Gulledge of Greenwood.

"It's an astonishing place," Saikku said. "You can look at this place and imagine that this is what the whole Delta must have looked like in 1930."

Better yet, his son caught a 40-pound blue catfish in the Mississippi River. Circling the room and capturing the evening on his smartphone on Friday, the boy could not withhold his pleasure, beaming with pride each time his father mentioned the mammoth catch.

Saikku said the deforestation of the Delta was "one of the greatest ecological events the country has ever seen."

Great as in permanently altering the land, an accomplishment of mythic proportions with biblical implications reflected upon by Faulkner, whose words begin and end Saikku's book:

"This Delta, he thought. This Delta. This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations ... No wonder the ruined woods

I used to know don't cry for retribution! he thought. The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge." (from "Go Down, Moses")